I PURELY COMMENTARY
Reminiscences of Black Jewish History Under Stalin
PHILIP SLOMOVITZ
Editor Emeritus
I
t is no wonder that they are re-
corded as the "Black Years in
Russian-Jewish History Under
Stalin — 1948-1953." The Communist
Russian tyrant put his hatred into ac-
tion and ordered the murder of scores
of the most distinguished Jewish
literary and artistic leaders.
The names of some of them were
listed on this page in the Sept. 18 issue,
calling attention to the commemoration
of the tragic pogrom, the horror of
which is now recalled in the tributes to
the memory of the victims of Stalinism.
The commemoration, scheduled as
one of the important contributions to
communal activities here by the Sarah
and Morris Friedman Yiddish Culture
Series of the United Hebrew Schools,
will not only remember the names of
the victims of those tragic years. It will
also recall a gigantic Stalinist failure
— the mass murderer's inability to
fulfill a desire to exile all Russian Jews
to their doom in Siberia.
The commemoration of the 1952
mass murder of Russian Yiddish
writers, artists and masters of the
theater will be occasion to indicate the
genius of the massacred, their Jewish
loyalties, and also their loyalties to
their "Mother Russia." Stalin had
chosen to accuse them of "cosmopolitan
Zionism?' That was their crime! But
they had organized, only a decade
before their martyrdom, the Russian
Anti-Fascist Committee. Their leaders
traveled here to raise funds for the com-
mittee with the aim of solidifying the
war front against Nazism. By that time,
the Russian pact with Hitler was
broken and Germany's aim was to con-
quer and destroy Russia. The roles of
Detroiters in aiding the Russian Anti-
Fascist Committee, in 1943, under the
leadership of Fred Butzel, Aaron
Rosenberg and a group of prominent
Jews, was outlined in the story about
the commemoration as a project of the
Friedmans' Yiddish lectures and
cultural projects, in the Sept. 18 article
here.
There are many lessons to be
acknowledged in recalling that era. A
major one is the Jewish loyalty that was
in evidence in the cultural Jewish
ranks. Stalin's victims were Jewish
scholars who took pride in their
historical backgrounds, in their
heritage and their teachers. They were
not religiously committed. Yet they had
an abiding faith as Jews. That's why
they were condemned to be victims of
a Stalin pogrom. They were secularists.
Therefore what is being commemorated
in the Friedman-sponsored event at the
United Hebrew Schools on Oct. 25 is an
admonition that there is a time not to
despise but to respect secularists and all
fellow Jews.
Shlomo Mikhoels, who gained fame
as dramatist, poet, stagecraft expert,
and Itzik Feffer, poet and novelist, who
were among the massacred in 1952,
were the guests here as representatives
of the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee a
decade before their death.
Itzik Feffer is especially important
in this reminiscence as a factor in ad-
vancing Jewish loyalties in the early
decades of Communist domination. Fef-
fer, who was born in 1900 and was ex-
ecuted Aug. 12, 1952, was considered
the most famous of the martyred Jewish
writers. He became widely known on a
global scale when he went on his war-
time mission to England and Canada as
well as the United States on behalf of
the Moscow-based Anti-Fascist Com-
mittee to not only strengthen the
alliance against Hitlerism but also to
assure support for the Red Army in
which he had the rank of colonel. In the
Yiddish literary records he remains
famous for his poem "I Am a Jew." In
a translation from the Yiddish into
English by Martin Birnbaum, himself
a well-known Yiddish poet, the poem
appeared in its full three-page text in
the July-August 1980 issue of Jewish
Currents, edited by Morris U. Schappes.
The first five stanzas of the poem are:
The heady wine of
generations
Has strengthened me upon
my road,
The evil knife of gloom and
pain
Could not destroy my
treasured load—
My faith, my people, nor my
striving—
My spirit always rose anew
From under swords my cry
was heard:
I am a Jew!
Eternity forever bears the
pride
That's mine upon her hands.
It would not break! It did not
yield
To tyrants of whatever lands.
No Haman ever stilled my
soul!
Through pyre flames of every
hue
From Spain's auto-da-fe I
called:
I am a Jew!
In forty years of Nomad's
trek,
Through searing storms I did
not tire.
The winds that forged and
steeled my heart
They fanned Bar Kochba's
sacred fire.
My grandfather has left with
me
A heritage—his stiff-necked
view.
I stand with him:
I am a Jew!
I gathered gold? Yes, when I
could—
Continued on Page 44
Admirable Henry Ford II Record Overshadows Bias
A
tone is a misjudged term when
applied to Henry Ford II in
recalling the villainous in his
grandfather Henry Ford I.
The grandson grew up in the home
of parents who themselves suffered
from the elder's bias. Edsel Ford was
maligned and mistreated by his father,
Henry the elder. Henry II could not
have missed sensing how his grand-
father abused his father. Mrs. Edsel
Ford, who was admired as one of the
great Detroit ladies, suffered a share in
that family agony. Did Henry Ford II
have a duty to atone for the sins of
Grandfather Henry Ford I?
There is the familiar admonition
about a parent sinning and the son's
teeth being set on edge, but the
undeniable humanistic record of Henry
Ford II hardly invites such testing. On
the contrary, it compels an erasure of
his and his parents' names from a role
in the ugly record of the elder, the
anti-Semite.
Are children destined to be punish-
ed for the sins of their fathers? The Pro-
phet Jeremiah alludes to it. In
Jeremiah 31:28-29 we read:
In those days they shall say
no more:
`The fathers have eaten sour
grapes,
And the children's teeth are
set on edge.'
But every one shall die for his
own iniquity; every man that
2
FRIDAY, OCT 9, 1987
eateth the sour grapes, his
teeth shall be set on edge.
Surely, there is absolution for
Henry Ford II.
In the course of time, Henry Ford II
learned all the details about a grand-
father's hatred for Jews, his association
with an editorial staff on the newspaper
he published — the Dearborn Indepen-
dent — whose major aims in life were
dominated by anti-Semitism.
He must have learned very early
about the domination in the Ford em-
pire of the former prizefighter Harry
Bennett. The very first day of his ac-
quisition of the presiding role in the
Ford Motor Co., at the age of 28, was
dramatic. He had ordered Bennett to
take him for a drive to see the parental
home grounds and the Ford plant. Hav-
ing finished the tour he turned to
Grandpa's chief guide and adviser and
said in some terms like these: "Now get
out of here, never to be seen again." It
was the beginning of the era of Ford
family decency, the end of the elder's
anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic jour-
nalistic bigotries, the firing of the chief
guide of the grandfather's venomous
delusions.
I was witness to the manner in
which Henry Ford II reacted to reports
he kept hearing about the anti-
Semitism that besmirched his family
name. It was at a 1972 luncheon he
hosted in the Ford Motor Co. Glass
House headquarters private lunchroom.
Henry Ford II
The other guests who were with me at
the function he hosted were Raphael
Levy, who then held an important posi-
tion in the national United Jewish Ap-
peal, and Boris Smolar, who was chief
columnist and editorial executive of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency. There was
frank discussion and I spoke freely
about the anti-Semitism that had been
wiped out from his family by his firm-
ness. I took occasion in our conversation
to recall a luncheon in his grandfather's
private dining room in the Ford Dear-
born building, hosted at the suggestion
of Henry Ford I by Harry Bennett. The
latter invited me in order to deny on
behalf of Henry Ford I that he was anti-
Semitic. When I posed some names of
anti-Semites who reportedly had close
associations with the elder Ford, Ben-
nett said to me in the presence of those
attending the luncheon, including four
or five Ford Co. engineers and the all-
American University of Michigan foot-
ball star Harry Newman: "Mr. Ford is
not an anti-Semite . . . So he did give
$5,000 to Elizabeth Dilling. So
what?"Bennett himself introduced in-
to the discussion the name of an anti-
Semitic woman.
Henry Ford II listened to the story,
smiled, shook his head throughout the
discussion, affirming by his silence that
he was aware of the tactics of his grand-
father's Jew-baiting associates and
advisers.
In a footnote in his authoritative
The Public Image of Henry Ford: An
American Folk Hero and His Company
(Wayne State University Press), Prof.
David Lewis mentions my meeting with
Bennett. I was then the editor of the
Detroit Jewish Chronicle. Dr. Lewis
noted: "Philip Slomovitz, editor of the
Jewish Chronicle, urged (the elder) Ford
in 1940 — when the leftist press
repeatedly charged the magnate with
anti-Semitism — to reaffirm his 1937
stand. Ford instructed Harry Bennett
to meet with Slomovitz to deny the
charges orally."
Continued on Page 44